User:Darenwelsh

About me

I want information at NASA to be at my fingertips like using a Google or Wikipedia search. Jamesmontalvo3 and I introduced Semantic MediaWiki at NASA's Johnson Space Center to solve massive knowledge management problems within the EVA community. Now we're expanding that to other organizations within Mission Operations. This requires both technical implementation and a cultural movement, but it wouldn't be fun if it was easy.

My work

My day job is at NASA. I train astronauts how to perform EVAs (spacewalks), I write procedures for those EVAs, and I help astronauts execute their EVAs as an EVA flight controller in MCC.

Create a graphic representation of a timeline. This is still very customized for use at NASA, but you could use it to generate overviews for things like a conference agenda or any other event spanning several hours.

As a co-founder of EnterpriseMediawiki.org, I hope to connect users and organizations who employ MediaWiki in "corporate" environments. While this does not exclude public and non-profit organizations, the focus of this group is on an environment much different than that of Wikipedia. In an organization where members or employees are expected to contribute, it takes a different approach to stimulate user contributions. EMW also hopes to foster collaboration between organizations on new extensions to improve the usefulness of MW as an open-source knowledge management system in an enterprise environment.

During my initial training in the EVA group, I was appalled with how difficult it was to find documentation and training materials. When I did find relevant information, it was outdated and often-times presented in duplicate sources with conflicting statements. Coming from a prior job in software development and testing, I couldn't believe how little effort was put into search-ability and revision control of these documents. Anyone could easily modify or even delete critical information without any documentation. There had to be a better way. Why didn't they do it like the rest of us? When we want to learn something, we search on Google and Wikipedia.

After years of trying to find the right people who could envision the same system as I had in mind, Jamesmontalvo3 joined the cause and helped make it happen. Since 2012, we have been developing and using an in-house semantic wiki using MW and several extensions. Once we had a critical mass to demonstrate how powerful this tool can be, we gained approval and support. In 2013, the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) EVA group officially declared the wiki as the core of its knowledge management. Now we have a wiki network of over 10 wikis integrating the knowledge store of all groups within FOD. There's even discussion of how we could make this tool available to astronauts aboard the ISS using some method of offline sync.